UAS Traffic Management (UTM) Prototype for 24 Hour Aerial Firefighting

Climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of western wildfires. Threats to people and infrastructure are growing with more population living in the wildland-urban interface. Blindly throwing more resources at the problem while doing things the same way is not a cost-effective. Extending manned and unmanned aerial firefighting to 24-hour, second-shift operations will provide a major increase in firefighting effectiveness and efficiency. nbsp;During the night, winds die down, temperatures decrease and humidity increases making night time a more productive time to fight fires from the air. But, existing airspace management processes are visual, manual, and not conducive to Unmanned Air Systems (UAS) participation. Hence, firefighting is largely restricted to manned, daytime, clear air mass visual operations. By applying emerging technology in innovative ways, firefighting will transition to round-the-clock operations with UAS picking up much of the workload.During Phase II, a full prototype Second-Shift Aerial Supervision Module (SSASM) will be developed to extend aerial firefighting to second-shift operations while supporting simultaneous UAS support missions such as search and rescue, surveillance and resupply. SSASM eliminates the daytime overhead stack and allows manned/unmanned tanker loads to be delivered on arrival, vastly improving efficiency and lowering cost. Night operations are de-conflicted through the use of innovative 4-D corridors and airspace containers. Progress is monitored on AirBoss displays with automatic detection of traffic conflicts during planning and execution. SSASM supports ground based, manned and unmanned tanker mission planning, tasking, and 4D trajectory guidance from ingress, retardant delivery, and egress. Mission metrics are down linked for evaluation of drop effectiveness. Real-time, persistent surveillance enables night firefighting operations. Line-of-Sight and SATCOM data communication architectures are demonstrated.